Louisiana Has Ghosts and Voodoo, But No UFOs?

With an entire Disney animated movie to hammer home the idea (The Princess and the Frog), it's no secret that Louisiana has deep ties to ghost stories and voodoo. More than ghosts, the Bayou State also has a deep lore of mysterious paranormal creatures like the Rougaroux, but not one famous UFO story to the state's credit.

Ghosts and Spirits With No Flying Saucers

Across the state of Louisiana, there are haunted locations, places where people swear they've seen a ghost. With cemeteries like St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in NOLA, it's hard not to feel a little spooked in a graveyard that's centuries old. Maybe it's all of the ghosts that have us distracted, but there is not one notable story of a UFO sighting in Louisiana.

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New Mexico has the Trinity UFOs or the Roswell incident to their name, California has the Battle of Los Angeles, Texas has the Levelland case, Alabama has the Chiles-Whitted encounter, Kentucky has the Mantell incident, and the list goes on for almost every state except Louisiana. Even the Wikipedia list of UFO encounters doesn't have a single mention of the spookiest state in America.

Thomas Jefferson and The Cajun Alien

It seems odd that Louisiana doesn't have a notable UFO story, but after some digging, we know now that the real deal happened a long time ago. In April of 1800, plantation owner William Dunbar saw something in the sky about the size of a small house fly through the atmosphere at extreme speeds.

William Dunbar would tell that story to a friend of his who ended up publishing the incident in a book. That book was Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, written by President Thomas Jefferson. While the incident might seem easy enough to pass off as a meteor incident, there's an entire essay by Bill Thayer at the University of Chicago that proves what Dunbar described couldn't have been a meteor or asteroid.